For most healthcare orgs, it’s been a fact of life that EMR upgrades will cause existing reports to break.
Which means, healthcare leaders are regularly scrambling to get business insights from a report or dashboard they rely on, and developers are dropping everything to fix it.
Until now, there’s been no way to preemptively find and repair the reports that could potentially break.
This BI manager has found a solution.
For Jen Schugel and the developers and report writers at CentraCare in Minnesota, the Compendium Healthcare Data Catalog has made the difference.
“Anytime CentraCare has an EMR upgrade, things get changed that will break reports,” says Jen, who’s helping to manage business intelligence for this large healthcare organization in an interim leadership role.
“But our developers are able to use the Compendium Data Catalog to do an impact analysis ahead of the next EMR upgrade—so we can prevent issues ahead of time.”
Manually, it’s not even possible to do that without Compendium.
A valuable bonus of Compendium
It’s interesting to note that EMR upgrades aren’t the reason CentraCare implemented the Compendium Healthcare Data Catalog in the first place.
Having smoother EMR upgrades has been more of a helpful side effect.
CentraCare first started using Compendium to enable their leaders to find the reports they need—and to keep developers from having to redo reports that already exist. With Compendium, they can track, organize, and manage their tens of thousands of data-driven dashboards, reports, and other materials.
Jen says having this complete catalog of everything they’ve created is extremely valuable—and smoother EMR upgrades are just one example of why.
Compendium contains the SQL codes for all of our reports, so our developers can use it to search for any tables and columns that will be impacted across all of our reports and data objects.
Without Compendium, they’d be just waiting for things to break.
“We’ve got thousands of reports throughout CentraCare,” says Jen, “and there are probably one or two hundred different items that the EMR is changing with every upgrade that could potentially impact any of those reports.”
“Even if you tried to open up every report and look for all of those items,” she says, “manually, it’s not even possible to do that.”
“Before Compendium,” Jen says, “our developers didn’t have a way to look at views or stored procedures—so they’d just have to wait for a report to break and get a service ticket logged before they could address it.”
“Now they’re able to use Compendium to search for issues and generate a list of objects that will have to be modified,” she says.
With Compendium, our users have more confidence that things aren’t going to just break. We have more quality reports out there.
Preventing disruptions and improving quality
With their next EMR upgrade coming in two months, Jen says her team at CentraCare is busy preparing. Thanks to Compendium, she expects to have every issue handled before the upgrade, so no one will notice more than a blip.
“This will mitigate a lot of service tickets and calls from users about things that are broken,” she says. “It allows us to be proactive.”
Want your next EMR upgrade to go without a hitch?
The Compendium Healthcare Data Catalog helps you prevent data breaks, the easy way. Learn more.
